Pines

Pines

There is no word for the voice of pines,
that breathing chorus of a million
needles stirred by the wind.
And there, in the midst of that haunting song,
a child hears the dream of the endless, evergreen,
wilderness, the ancient forest.

Do those massed and patient trees
speak dark tales of the northern woods,
and the cold seeping from the shadowed depths
stir ancestral memories in the blood of one,
the boy come to share a yearning for home
with a few pines planted on an African hillside?

Would such arboreal revelation,
now buried as treasure in adolescent mind,
unshared, unspoken, secret desire,
prove the draw to another hemisphere
and so to a windswept northern land,
and to a giant forest called Kielder*?

There in the whispering breath of trees,
their multitude gathered for this reunion,
an adult now but still entranced,
the boy shares one more time the dream
of forebears in the darkling glade
and tales of deeds heroic.

A transplanted soul
without companions
is lost indeed.

*Kielder is the largest manmade forest in Britain. It is all pine trees for mile upon mile upon mile, the perfect apotheosis of the tiny collection of pine trees on my father’s property in Africa that inspired this poem.

Line Count: 27
Free verse